When on February 25, 1990, Violeta Chamorro was elected president of Nicaragua, it seemed that an end had finally come to the travail which had beset her country for the previous ten years.
It was in the late 1970’s that a popular revolution against the Somoza dictatorship was hijacked at the last moment by the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberation Nacional). Though the Sandinistas organized what appeared to be a coalition government, all power within it was concentrated in their hands; the non-Sandinistas—who included Violeta Chamorro herself, widow of a crusading newspaper editor murdered by Somoza—resigned one by one. During the 1980’s the Marxist policies followed by the Sandinistas wrecked Nicaragua’s economy. Real wages fell by perhaps 90 percent; a debt of over $10 billion was incurred; and the Soviet Union became the largest creditor of a country sunk in ever greater depths of penury.
Worse yet, with Marxism came a taste of Leninism: the Sandinistas transformed Nicaragua from a typically old-fashioned Latin autocracy into a police state, enlarging the security forces by roughly ten times the number Somoza had employed even at the height of the Sandinista rebellion against him. Opponents of the regime were jailed or, like the influential businessman Jorge Salazar, killed. Nicaraguans fled by the tens of thousands, establishing sizable colonies in the U.S., Honduras, and Costa Rica. Thousands of others joined the Nicaraguan resistance, or contras, to fight against the Sandinista regime.
But by 1990 it was all over—or so it seemed. Before the election, Nicaraguans had been too frightened to tell pollsters how they were planning to vote, in itself a measure of the oppression under which they lived. But the presence of thousands of foreign observers gave confidence that at least on election day the procedures would be fair, and the ballot secret, and so they were. The Sandinistas’ crushing defeat, after a campaign heavily weighted in their favor by state resources and pressure against Mrs. Chamorro’s fourteen-party coalition, was certified by none other than Jimmy Carter, whose unwillingness as President of the U.S. to act when a power vacuum developed in 1979 had had much to do with the Sandinistas’ ability to seize power in the first place.
Mrs. Chamorro’s decisive victory offered hope that the new government would be a strong one. It was very clear that she enjoyed ardent public backing. Moreover, she would have access to economic aid from Washington, the European Community, and Japan. Finally, with the Sandinistas out, the contra war would end. In short, Nicaragua seemed poised for democracy, peace, and a measure of economic recovery.
Now Mrs. Chamorro’s government has been in power for over a year, and the sad fact is that, although her personal popularity still remains high, the overall record of her government has been dismal. On the economic side, despite over $541 million in pledges of economic aid from the United States, of which over $200 million has already been delivered, the government has been unable to get production restarted, and the GDP fell by more than 4 percent in 1990. Until recently inflation was hard to calculate because it reached stratospheric rates—according to U.S. government estimates, 13,500 percent in 1990 (it is moderating in 1991). The exchange rate early this year was 25 million “old” cordobas to one dollar. And on the political side the record is even more dismal. Mrs. Chamorro’s coalition has fallen apart, and her ability to govern has been systematically destroyed by the very people she defeated at the polls—the Sandinistas. How have the hopes of 1990 been so quickly dashed?
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Mrs. Chamorro’s election victory was accepted by the stunned Sandinistas, and for this apparent conversion from Leninism to democracy they were much lauded by the likes of President Carter and Senator Christopher Dodd. But the conversion to democracy was an illusion: within days, the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega announced that his party would continue to “rule from below.”
The first overt challenge to the elected government came in May 1990, in the form of a week-long strike by Sandinista-led government employees’ unions against Mrs. Chamorro’s economic reform plan. This plan was a familiar and quite orthodox effort to spur production, reduce the size of the government deficit, and cut the government payroll. But cutting the payroll threatened the favored position of Sandinista party loyalists who had been placed in government jobs, and in this way threatened half the power base of the FSLN, the other half being the military.
Mrs. Chamorro had two options: give in to the strike, or resist it. To resist would have meant trying to organize “people power” (a term deriving from the massive demonstrations of support mustered by the Aquino forces in the Philippines), and there is no doubt that she would have succeeded in turning out hundreds of thousands of her compatriots for this purpose. After all, the taste of electoral victory was still strong in their mouths, as was the new sense of security against Sandinista threats. But Mrs. Chamorro did not do this; instead, she awarded the strikers the big raises they demanded. Another strike in July 1990, this one accompanied by violence, produced an even worse result: the government conceded to the Sandinistas a role in making economic policy.
These were hardly the only cases of government capitulation to Sandinista aggression. It turned out, for example, that the Sandinista elite had engaged in wholesale theft in the period between the election and Mrs. Chamorro’s inauguration. They helped themselves to vast amounts of government property, including houses and cars; to this day many live in mansions they seized years ago and to which they “legally” took title just before leaving office last year. The Chamorro government has not acted seriously to reverse these thefts, or to recover money paid out to Sandinista officials during their final weeks in power.
Similarly, Mrs. Chamorro’s government has displayed exceptional weakness in facing up to Sandinista control of the military. The earliest example was the decision, announced right after inauguration, to allow Humberto Ortega (Daniel’s brother) to stay on as head of the army. This decision was part of a secret agreement struck between Ortega and Antonio Lacayo, the most powerful minister in Mrs. Chamorro’s government, before the inauguration, and kept secret both from the public and from the other parties which were at least theoretically Mrs. Chamorro’s allies in the winning coalition. Although Mrs. Chamorro herself assumed the portfolio of the defense ministry, this only underscored the significance of the secret deal with Ortega, for according to its terms she agreed to shift all the important powers from the defense ministry to the army.
Humberto Ortega thus became the most powerful man in Nicaragua, and though Mrs. Chamorro had initially indicated that he would only be military commander for six months, in March 1991 Lacayo confirmed that he would remain in this post “indefinitely.”
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There is more. Instead of demanding that the dreaded Sandinista secret police be disbanded, Mrs. Chamorro permitted its work to be shifted to the army. And incredibly, with the functions and the personnel went the infamous Lenin Cerna, once and now again the secret-police chief in Nicaragua. The current head of the prison system is Marcos Arevalo, whose record as a Sandinista comandante earned him the nickname “El Carnicero”—the butcher. Thus the entire Sandinista security apparat remains intact. As for the Sandinista army, still under party control, it still numbers 28,000 in a bankrupt country with no enemies and no security threats.
One thing the Sandinistas are doing with their power is aiding the Marxist FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador. In 1990 the Sandinista high command denied any responsibility for the transfer of ground-to-air missiles from Nicaragua to the FMLN, but the discovery in Honduras this March of a truck full of munitions bound to the same destination indicates otherwise. Support for the Salvadoran guerrillas remains Sandinista policy, and apparently no one in the elected Nicaraguan government is in a position to stop it.
What about human rights? While the situation has in some ways improved enormously—for example, there is full freedom of the press and of religion—dozens of former contras have mysteriously turned up dead. Anti-government demonstrations last fall were also crushed by Sandinista policemen using not only tear gas but bullets. Further, Dr. Aristides Sanchez, a former leader of the resistance forces and a man from one of Nicaragua’s most distinguished families, was arrested in November and jailed in Managua’s maximum-security prison on the blatantly trumped-up charge of storing weapons in his home. Upon his release, he was taken straight to the airport and deported. The Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights, a group that opposed the Somozas and Sandinistas with equal courage, commented that this was “the forced exile of . . . the first political prisoner of the government of Mrs. Chamorro.”
And then on February 16 of this year came the murder of Enrique Bermudez, the former commander of the contras, outside the Intercontinental Hotel in the center of Managua. There can hardly be a person in Nicaragua who doubts the Sandinistas’ involvement in that crime. The reasoning is simple. With the economy collapsing, and the government appearing weaker and increasingly isolated from its early supporters, Bermudez was a possible rallying point of former contras and other peasant resisters. Such, precisely, was Bermudez’s purpose when he returned to Nicaragua late last year. His murder would thus send a message to anyone thinking of challenging Sandinista power.
The reaction of Mrs. Chamorro’s government to the Bermudez murder was pathetic—especially when compared with the response of the government of El Salvador to the murder of six Jesuits in that country in 1990. Then, an angry President Cristiani asked for and received the help of the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the Spanish police to investigate the crime—and not incidentally to keep his own police honest. He knew he could not credibly rely on those who might have been the perpetrators of the crime to solve it. Yet this is precisely what Mrs. Chamorro has done: the investigation of the Bermudez murder is in the hands of the Sandinista police.
Belatedly, Mrs. Chamorro did appoint a sort of oversight commission in the Bermudez case which includes a representative of the Catholic Church and of the contras, but it has no foreigners and no one with the capability to make independent technical judgments. In March, Bermudez’s widow wrote to Mrs. Chamorro, politely suggesting that the commission’s charge, which was to work together with the Sandinista police, would necessarily limit its ability to find out who killed her husband. In April, just before Mrs. Chamorro’s visit to Washington, her commission agreed, and unanimously urged the government to call for foreign help, noting that the Sandinista police “investigation” had yet to find the bullet that killed Bermudez, determine where it entered his body, or identify any suspects. Thus far, Mrs. Chamorro has not accepted the commission’s recommendation.
In short, Mrs. Chamorro is treating the murder of Enrique Bermudez as she did the Sandinista strikes and the arms shipments to the FMLN.
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How can one explain the behavior of Violeta Chamorro’s government? First, Mrs. Chamorro reigns; she does not rule. It was fashionable a year ago to complain that the “widows,” Mrs. Chamorro and Cory Aquino of the Philippines, were governing too weakly; today it would seem unfair to link these two, for Mrs. Aquino’s personal involvement in decision-making is much greater, and her willingness to take on opponents much stronger. Mrs. Chamorro does not seem to make, or even to be much involved in, the key economic or political decisions in Nicaragua, which means that at the very center of her government there is a vacuum. No one but she has the stature and legitimacy to stand up to the Sandinistas, but she refuses to do it. So it may be more accurate to say that she had the opportunity to rule, but abdicated.
Second, it would have made sense for Mrs. Chamorro, as the leader of a diverse electoral coalition, to assign tasks to members of the parties and groups supporting her; this would have had the additional benefit of strengthening that support. Instead, the coalition parties have been ignored by the government; the vice president, Virgilio Godoy, was not even given an office to work in. Mrs. Chamorro relies on a small coterie centered around Antonio Lacayo, her son-in-law, and his brother-in-law, Alfredo Cesar. (Lacayo is now minister of the presidency, and Cesar is head of the National Assembly.) Both are very smart, very ambitious, very elegant. Both are democrats of deep conviction, but they also seem to have at least one other conviction that is equally deep: namely, that they and their class were meant to rule.
Indeed, few aspects of the Chamorro government have been more striking than its social and class configuration. Mrs. Chamorro would not be president had it not been for the sacrifices of tens of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants, some in the contra forces, some relatives of contras, some with no contra connection. The very wide support the contras won among the peasantry has by now been acknowledged even by the Sandinistas. (Luis Carrion Cruz, long a powerful member of the Sandinista National Directorate, has said, for example, that “In the end, the contra was a campesino [peasant] movement with its own leaders. . . . Really the [Sandinista] Revolution was eminently urban.”) Yet while Mrs. Chamorro’s government has been quick to compromise with Sandinista strikers on the public payroll in Managua, the benefits that have accrued to the campesinos from her government are hard to discern. The rural standard of living fell during Sandinista rule, and it is still falling. The promises made to the contras at the time they gave up their arms, promises above all of land, and of freedom from Sandinista persecution, have been honored more in the breach than in the observance.
This is a government of the urban, well-to-do, white, American-educated elite, the same elite that ruled before the Somozas and whose political incompetence helped open the door to the Somozas. Now it is back, and its presence helps explain why the current government is more at ease making deals with well-educated Sandinistas—themselves the children of the urban middle class—than organizing poor, illiterate peasants. In a sense, the Chamorro victory was an exercise in reallocating power within a single urban elite.
Mrs. Chamorro has been described as a kind of mother figure, trying to heal the wounds that divide her society even as she tries to heal those that split her own family: of her four children, two are active and ardent Sandinistas, and two are equally vigorous anti-Sandinistas. The image is a powerful one, much played upon in Mrs. Chamorro’s presidential campaign, but it deserves a careful look. For Mrs. Chamorro has no campesinos in her family.
All this illuminates the third main weakness of her government, its defeatism. The examples of it noted above are but the tip of the iceberg. The overall strategy Mrs. Chamorro’s advisers apparently adopted before the election was to compromise with the Sandinistas rather than challenge them, believing themselves too weak to risk a confrontation. The size of Mrs. Chamorro’s victory apparently left those advisers unmoved. Yet one need not be a political sage to realize that a government that defines itself as weak, will be.
It has sometimes puzzled observers why the government is so terribly reluctant to risk a confrontation. The desire to avoid violence cannot be a full explanation; there is no way of knowing that the Sandinistas, had they been confronted early on by a firm and extremely popular president, would have turned to violence. The truth is that Mrs. Chamorro’s government has only two choices. It can rule with the Sandinistas, and ignore the masses of peasants; or it can struggle against the Sandinistas by organizing and truly empowering those peasants. This latter course it has steadfastly refused even to consider. Mrs. Chamorro’s advisers thus closed off the possibility of her displacing Sandinista power with her own, and accepted the need for what would be at best a form of co-government.
This neglect of the campesinos has opened a window of opportunity for the Sandinistas, who have recognized the strategic error they made by alienating rural Nicaraguans after their 1979 seizure of power. Their advantage lies in the fact that they recognize Mrs. Chamorro is committing the same error today, although she and her advisers seem blithely unaware of it. Yet so deep is the hatred of the Sandinistas in rural Nicaragua that it will remain very difficult for them to win campesino support no matter how clever their next campaign.
Opinion polls show that a very strong majority of Nicaraguans, including campesinos, still approve of Mrs. Chamorro’s government—both because of her exceptional personal appeal, and because they credit her with ending the war and replacing the Sandinistas. After her term in office, no anti-Sandinista candidate will have her personal popularity, and none will be credited with having brought the Sandinista period of war and oppression to an end. Nicaragua’s political future will thus hinge on whether the anti-Sandinista majority can unite and elect a government that truly represents the country—or whether, as now, a small group of civilian officials will go on making deals with the Sandinistas behind the façades of their government offices. Without Mrs. Chamorro’s political magic, democracy in Nicaragua may once again be threatened by Sandinista power and the weakness and divisions among those resisting it.
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What does this mean for U.S. policy? For many Americans who had always opposed aid to the contras, Mrs. Chamorro’s February 1990 victory provided proof that the contra option had been wrong all along: democracy, it seemed, could come to Nicaragua without war. Contra supporters, on the other hand, believed that her victory was largely owed to the military efforts of the peasant troops who had kept the option of democracy open by preventing a total consolidation of Sandinista power. But even many of these supporters now agreed that whatever the contras’ earlier contributions, the electoral outcome of February 1990 was the best possible result. An elected government would be stronger, and more adept at handling the Sandinistas, than any contra government imposed by force of arms could have been.
Today that conclusion is harder and harder to defend. Had the United States continued to help the contras instead of suspending aid in early 1988, the impressive military gains they were then making would have continued. One possible outcome would have been a negotiated settlement on better terms than were ultimately accepted. Such a settlement, instead of disbanding the contras while Sandinista forces remained intact, would have disarmed both sides simultaneously, and thereby prevented the Sandinistas from regaining an absolute monopoly on force within the country. A second possible outcome would have been that the contras would win sufficient military victories to spur a kind of insurrection against Sandinista rule. In either event, the current government would have had more power and the Sandinistas less.
Perhaps more to the point, had the contras “won,” for the first time in Nicaraguan history power would have begun to shift from the urban elites to the rural masses. This would have brought to Nicaragua a kind of democratization going far beyond the formal processes observed on election day, as well as the sort of profound social and political revolution that American policy aimed at.
This is a lesson that is resisted in today’s Washington. During Mrs. Chamorro’s state visit in April she asked for “steadfast financial assistance from the United States throughout this entire decade.” President Bush declined to make a commitment quite that large, but indicated that the U.S. would try to secure more help from the World Bank, and from other potential donors like Japan or the Europeans. “One way or another, together we will do it,” the President told her. And indeed, an additional American grant of $75 million and a series of Latin, European, and Japanese loans pledged in May will enable Nicaragua to clear its debts to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and begin receiving additional loans from them in 1992. It seems, then, that foreign money will pay for the “conciliation” with the Sandinistas. With a little help from her friends overseas, Mrs. Chamorro will be able to avoid a test of power for a while longer, and perhaps even until her term is over.
Her determination to avoid such a test reveals the truth of the assessment offered last September by that true hero of modern Nicaragua, Cardinal Obando y Bravo: “Right now, the FSLN is running the country.” The Sandinista gamble in allowing a free election to go forward has paid off. The formal democratic structure introduced by the 1990 election has become not a guarantee of popular rule, but a protective shield for the Sandinistas. They make the decisions that are important to them, and leave the rest to the government.
In Washington, the fierce debates of the 80’s over Nicaragua are gone from Capitol Hill. But the Sandinistas are not gone from Managua, where they still wield power, and where that power still comes from the barrel of a gun. This is not what voters sought when they bravely went to the polls to vote, and not what they thought they had won, but it is what they have got.
